Troping the Foreign in P.K. Page’s ‘Questions and Images’

The years that poet P.K. Page spent in Brazil as wife of the Canadian ambassador are widely considered to be a transformative episode in her literary career, marking a dramatic shift in her aesthetics. Critical work on Brazil’s influence on Page tends, however, to deploy Brazil as a trope of the foreign, eliding her affiliation with the Canadian embassy. This construction of Brazil mirrors Page’s own narrativization of her time there, exemplified in her 1969 essay ‘Questions and Images,’ originally published in a special tenth anniversary issue of Canadian Literature but most frequently cited in its 1991 republication in The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New. This essay examines the different print contexts of ‘Questions and Images’ to call for a rereading of Page’s Brazilian work that is more attentive to the geopolitical realities of Canadian-Brazilian relations and the alignment of Page’s travels with a particular moment in Canadian cultural nationalism.